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Palestine Monitor
11 September 2007
“We are having visits all
the time from the Israeli military, especially in these last months and
especially at night. They enter the camp at about 1am, and occupy the
rooftops. I know more and more residents are sleeping during the day
now, because they can’t rest at night.”
Yosef Zubdah is the UN
Administrator of Ein Beit el Ma refugee camp in Nablus. He’s a large,
quietly spoken man, who oversees one of the smallest, most ravaged camps
in the Palestinian West Bank.
Ein Beit el
Ma refugee camp in Nablus is one of the poorest camps in the West Bank
Ein Beit el Ma has around
seven thousand residents from some 1,400 refugee families. Like other
West Bank refugee camps, the residents here live in apartments literally
stacked on top of each other. The United Nations Relief and Works Agency
(UNRWA), which administers the camp, carries out basic maintenance
during the day, but is powerless to stop nightly invasions by the
Israeli military.
“The soldiers blow holes
in walls when they want to enter buildings” says Yosef. “They regularly
destroy people’s front doors, and their windows, which leaves them
terrified even after the soldiers have left. After a bad visit night my
office is completely deserted, because the residents are putting their
houses back together. From the destruction I have seen I believe they
sometimes come here to intentionally damage and destroy homes.”
We ask to see the camp
itself, and Nassar, a camp resident who works for UNRWA, offers to guide
us around. Ein Beit el Ma is cramped and claustrophobic. After just a
few metres the streets narrow into alleyways and we walk in single file.
Dirty water leaks across the broken concrete paths, and all sunlight is
blocked by the two and three storey apartment buildings pressing in on
both sides. The walls are spattered with bullet holes, and plastered
with posters of shahids or ‘martyrs:’ young men from across Nablus who
have been killed fighting the Israeli military.
Posters of
Nassir Mabrook, who died two weeks ago, are plastered across Ein Beit el
Ma refugee camp.
We squeeze past a young
woman carrying several books. She says hello, and Nassar tells us both
her brothers are in jail in Israel. Then he offers to introduce us to
the Mabrook family.
We climb a flight of
stairs up to the Mabrook home. Aiman Mabrook meets us at the door, and
invites us in to meet his father, Ali. The living room where Ali Mabrook
is sitting is a shrine. The dozen or so framed family photographs are
dwarfed by a floor-to-ceiling length poster of the face of a bearded
young man. Ali Mabrook tells us this is his eldest son, Nassir, who was
a fighter for the Abu Ali Mustafa Brigades, the armed wing of the
Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP). The Brigades are
named after the PFLP leader who was assassinated by Israel in August
2001.
On the 16th of July this
year, Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas asked all Palestinian armed
resistance groups to relinquish their weapons to the Palestinian
National Authority. Some members of Fatah’s armed wing, the Al Aqsa
Martyrs Brigades, complied, but the Abu Ali Mustafa Brigades stated they
would not cease their armed resistance until the Israeli military
unoccupied the entire West Bank and Gaza Strip. Israel, the United
States and the European Union have condemned all PFLP members as
terrorists. But to many of the residents of this besieged camp, they are
heroes willing to die for a free Palestine.
Two weeks ago Nassir, was
shot and killed in Ein Beit el Ma by the Israeli military. He was forty
years old and married with seven children. His younger brother, Imad,
was killed by the Israeli military in 2004, and another brother, Jihad,
was arrested two weeks ago and is now in jail in Israel.
Aiman and
his father, Ali Mabrook, describe life and death in the camp.
“I am very proud of both
my sons who died” says Ali Mabrook. “They are martyrs, the roots of the
Palestinian people. Our resistance in this camp is to show the Israelis
that we are here to stay. Compared to them we are very small, but our
resistance fighters are defying the soldiers.”
Nassir and Imad Mabrook
both died in battle against the Israeli military. But other, unarmed,
residents of this camp have been killed inside their own homes. Bullets
frequently shatter windows, and people are injured and sometimes maimed.
The residents say they cannot walk around their own rooms at night, for
fear of being seen as moving targets. They claim the Israeli military
shoot indiscriminately.
Amongst the martyr
posters plastered across the camp is a gruesome image of a bloody fetus.
On the night of May 10th this year Maha el Tahtouni was at home with her
family. Her young son was sleeping on the floor. She climbed out of her
bed to pick him up and put him into his bed, and felt a sudden sharp
pain in her back. Maha was seven months pregnant at the time, and the
bullet that pierced her back killed her baby instantly. She is
struggling with chronic pain and the grief of losing her unborn child.
Israeli military
invasions do not stop at Ein Beit el Ma. The military invades the entire
city of Nablus every night - and as the jeeps enter the gunfire starts.
There are nightly battles between the Israeli military and Palestinian
fighters in the labyrinthine old city, and the four refugee camps around
Nablus – Balata, Askar, Al Ein and Ein Beit el Ma.
Rubble at
the entrance of Ein Beit el Ma
According to Dr Ghassan
Hamdan, Director of the Union of Palestinian Medical Relief Committees (UPMRC)
in Nablus, more than seven hundred men were arrested by the Israeli
military in Nablus in August. Israel claims it is targeting ‘wanted men’
from the Al Aqsa Brigades, Al Qassam Brigades (the armed wing of Hamas)
and the PFLP. But Dr Ghassan, who has directed the UPMRC emergency
services in Nablus for seventeen years, disputes this claim. He does not
voice support for any of the fighters, but says the Israeli military are
intent on breaking all resistance to the occupation of Palestine, and
that unarmed civilians, including children, are frequently caught in the
crossfire.
For Ali Mabrook the
situation is clear. “It is them or us” he says of the Israeli military.
“They do not come here to arrest people. They come to kill them.”
His son, Aiman, has been
sitting quietly at his father’s side. When Aiman does finally speak, his
voice is low. “I have just come out of an Israeli prison” he says. “It
is not safe anywhere here in the camp. Last night they came in with
these big bright lights and just shot everywhere. I hate the night.”
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